Providing a frontend for file sync and share solutions integrated into end-to-end researcher workflows - RSpace & owncloud

About

In the era of data-intensive research and data science, the challenge of managing research data effectively while ensuring FAIR principles isn't just a technical problem—it's a collaborative one. This presentation explores how the needs of researchers, research software providers, and research IT can be addressed together by a commitment to vertical interoperability between research tools and infrastructure to provide end-to-end workflows across tools and research phases. As an example, we will show how a file sync and share solution commonly provided by research infrastructure, Owncloud, can be integrated with a generalist research tool, RSpace, to seamlessly facilitate FAIR data management as part of everyday workflows.

RSpace is a generalist solution for the active phases of research that provides researchers with an electronic laboratory notebook and sample management solution interoperable with a variety of research tools and services. The extended RSpace ecosystem thereby covers most phases of the research data lifecycle from planning to publishing data and enables end-to-end solutions integrated into everyday workflows. Additionally, RSpace integrates with IT infrastructure for e.g. storing, sharing and managing digital assets, which often pose usability challenges for researchers and frustration for the IT organisation when services are not adopted or not properly used. RSpace addresses these problems by providing a frontend for managing data in such filestore solutions and integrating these into typical researcher workflows.

In 2024, RSpace extended their integration with the iRODS file management solution, so that users can directly store the data they collect in everyday workflows in iRODS. The ongoing development phase focusses on metadata exchange between iRODS and RSpace to further improve the robustness of links to remote locations in RSpace documents as well as increase the discoverability and manageability of files in an institutional file store…